Steal The Blog
After earlier reminding myself of my own thoughts on recency and temporality, I got stuck on an image: people are verbs, not nouns—which really is what I was trying to get at by saying that they live “their lives as processes, not as end-products”. What happened to blogs due to content marketers is that they wanted to shoehorn nouns into a form meant for verbs (in the process constructing all sorts of tricks purported to enhance your “search engine optimization”, like removing dates from URLs so that the content was considered by Google to be timeless and relevant in perpetuity if not actually important). So when Joel Hooks says to “stop giving a fuck and start writing more”, that’s actually a perfect description of blogging-as-it-was before the content marketers and SEO hucksters glommed on and bastardized the thing. Which, again, is not to say that the blog is everything and everything should be a blog. It’s just to say—again—that while some are building digital gardens, others should be stealing back the blog.